Rachel Reeves ‘neutering’ Britain’s attempts to prepare for war

The former head of the British Army has blasted Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s inability to properly fund the UK’s preparations for war. Lord Dannatt, who served as the Chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009, believes the UK needs to do more to rearm in order to counter and deter the threats from the country’s adversaries.

Laying out a series of threats facing the UK, the former senior officer raised concerns over the Chancellor’s ability to raise defence spending to the levels required to achieve the aims set out in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) last month. He said: “Whichever way one looks at the international situation today, it is volatile and potentially dangerous in the extreme. A vicious land war in Europe, intense conflicts in the Middle East now with Iran’s nuclear capability possibly having survived the much-vaunted obliteration, tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and President Xi of China pondering whether the time is right to swallow up Taiwan; all this paints a most threatening picture.

“And yet with sleight of hand, the Chancellor neuters Britain’s soft power by moving 0.2% of GDP from the Development budget to the Defence budget, finds just another 0.1% for Defence in her Spending Review and thinks the job is done.”

At last month’s NATO summit, the UK and other member states pledged to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 to meet what Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as an “era of radical uncertainty”.

The target replaces the previous target of 2%, a threshold that some member states are yet to reach, raising genuine concerns about their ability and motivation to more than double defence spending over the next decade.

Critics criticised the timeframe as being too long, with Lord Dannatt’s successor echoing claims by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Vladimir Putin could be ready and willing to attack a NATO state by 2030.

Others have pointed out that the allocation of 1.5% of the new defence spending target to “homeland security and national resilience” measures leaves too much scope for “creative accounting.“

The disdain displayed by President Trump for NATO in the past has led many to question the reliability of the United States to come to the aid of a member state should it request to invoke Article 5. Lord Dannatt believes Europe must acknowledge the potential for the United States to take a lesser role in European security and plan accordingly.

He said: “We Europeans must look after ourselves, as far as he is concerned. European member states of Europe must step up to the bar in that last chance saloon and get real.

“For this country it means a decision now to commit to spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2034, or we risk a lingering war with Russia, hovering either side of the nuclear threshold.”